Strontium Contamination in the Environment

Dr. Pankaj Pathak is an Assistant Professor at Marwadi University Rajkot, India with a keen interest in the area of waste management and geochemistry, including sustainable handling of nuclear waste and associated environmental impacts. She has been involved in several research projects at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay related with nuclear waste management, where she gained experience in characterizing buffer materials for nuclear waste repositories. In addition, she is also working on projects related with hazardous waste characterization, disposal and remediation techniques. Dr. Dharmendra K. Gupta is working as a Sr. Scientist at Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Germany, and his main field of research is pollution remediation of contaminated environments (radioactive materials, metal/metalloids stresses in water, soil and in plants). Within this field, he also has an interest in molecular biology, metal speciation, water, air, soil testing and treatment, plant molecular physiology, phytoremediation of radioactive materials/toxic metal ions, antioxidant enzymes in plants and in algae, protein analysis, low molecular binding peptides (phytochelatin) and related biochemical parameters and also screening, isolation of Rhizobium strains useful for revegetation of fly-ash (coal-ash) dumping sites, as well as using of saprophytic and symbiotic fungi together to revegetate radioactively contaminated sites. He also works in the field of environmental impact and assessment (EIA) of industrially polluted sites and hazardous waste material disposal. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed research papers in respected high impact journals and 13 books with renowned international publishers, including Springer.

Strontium: Source, occurrence, properties and detection.- Isotopes of strontium: Properties and applications.- Strontium extraction from the geo-environment.- Biosorption of strontium from aqueous solutions.- Plant response under strontium and phytoremediation.- Uptake, transport, and remediation of strontium.- Spatial distribution of ⁹⁰Sr in the ecosystems of Polesie State Radiation-Ecological Reserve.- Spatial distribution of ⁹⁰Sr from different sources in soils of the Urals region, Russia.- ⁹⁰Sr in the components of pine forests of Belarusian part of  Chernobyl NPP exclusion zone.- Removal of strontium by physio-chemical adsorption and ion exchange methods.- Use of the sorption method for strontium removal.- Assessment of the alkaline earth metals (Ca, Sr, Ba) and their associated health impacts.